Nations have proved unable over 65 years to eliminate nuclear weapons. We must draw a conclusion from this overwhelming fact. The peril’s longevity and the nations’ tolerance of the threat steadily enlarge the danger.
Target populations once lived just in U.S. and Soviet cities, but with proliferation and the danger that terrorists will become nuclear armed, cities world-wide are fair game. Non-urban populations are equally exposed, from fall-out and the destruction of civilized infrastructure.
Now, it seems, the cost to prevent attack and to pick up the pieces after the curtain has fallen on this nation-conceived, nation-sustained horror show should be borne in part by cities.
Tara O’Toole, an Undersecretary of the Homeland Security Department, told a university audience with reference to an unconventional weapon strike, “We do have to start thinking very seriously about what we would actually do the day after an attack” Well, yes, and she went on to call it a “continuing, nagging problem” to decide who should foot the bill, whether the federal, state, or local government. (Global Security Newswire, June 10, 2010)
Decisions are made by people with power. Power belongs to those who profit from war and weapons, and to ideologically fixated national patriots and ethnic, economic, religious, and tribal zealots. The rest of us, which means most people, have not pursued enforced law as the substitute for war, available though it now is, thanks to accessible communication and travel that make global governance possible .
That we fail to do this, that we capitalize on modern communication and travel to make money and have fun but not to achieve security, is attributable to our continuing, misplaced reliance on our nations, or whichever one we live in, to look after us. But nations answer to their power holders, and the mass of humanity has not organized itself to wield power on behalf of security. To vote once in two or four years is the mere semblance of power.
The one place where targeted humanity might obtain power and consolidate efforts to overcome the sovereignty shibboleth that so blinds us to the requirements of authentic security, is in the cities and towns of the world.
Showing posts with label Sister Cities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sister Cities. Show all posts
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Jeb Brugmann
An old friend has written a book for which my City, Save Thyself! might serve as a companion volume. In Welcome to the Urban Revolution - How Cities Are Changing the World (N.Y.: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), Jeb Brugmann asserts that nations are “losing their centrality in the economic, ecological, and political end games that will play out in this century. The momentum of development has steadily shifted to the city, a territory still poorly understood by most nations.” (p. 274)
Brugmann provides fascinating case studies from cities in Brazil, Spain, Canada, India, and the United States, of urban growth and change, in some cases immensely productive, in some destructive, all in continuous flux. He describes the roles played by national and city governments, neighborhood associations, politicians, corporations, and city planners. Success for city residents as the world grows more urbanized, hinges on many factors. What city dwellers most have going for themselves is population density. Their power of association can be leveraged to overcome the destructive results of economic, technological, and individual mistakes made at the national level and in corporate offices.
I would add that, just as national and corporate planners create misery when they manipulate the economy for narrow, short term profit aims, exploit natural resources, relocate populations without regard for the necessities of association and community, and build infrastructure in disregard for human scale and use, so they perpetuate the war system. They fail to control and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, and spawn terrorists, because they make populations targets for fighting war instead of links to overcome grounds for conflict and to prevent war.
City, Save Thyself! argues that the worst national mistake is to prepare for war while neglecting globally enforced law that could prevent war. The target populations, leveraging their numbers in the manner that Brugmann describes, but adding direct elections to a global municipal security congress, could force the nations to remedy that neglect.
Jeb Brugmann and I were together in 1986 in Cambridge’s first sister city delegation to Yerevan, capital of Armenia, then still part of the U.S.S.R. Twenty U.S.-Soviet sister city pairings did as much to end the Cold War as Reagan’s arms race escalations, and without the ruinous economic and terrorist side effects of the nuclear arms race. Both Jeb’s book and mine describe these city initiatives.
Jeb made further trips to the Soviet Union and describes how powerless the Soviet government was to repress citizen initiatives, try as they often did. It is interesting to reflect that both the Gorbachev and Reagan governments encouraged the U.S.-U.S.S.R. sister city movement, and that, when it comes to security, Soviet cities may have freed themselves from national constraints better than our American cities that now, because of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons, may be more in danger from weapons of mass destruction than cities in any country.
Brugmann provides fascinating case studies from cities in Brazil, Spain, Canada, India, and the United States, of urban growth and change, in some cases immensely productive, in some destructive, all in continuous flux. He describes the roles played by national and city governments, neighborhood associations, politicians, corporations, and city planners. Success for city residents as the world grows more urbanized, hinges on many factors. What city dwellers most have going for themselves is population density. Their power of association can be leveraged to overcome the destructive results of economic, technological, and individual mistakes made at the national level and in corporate offices.
I would add that, just as national and corporate planners create misery when they manipulate the economy for narrow, short term profit aims, exploit natural resources, relocate populations without regard for the necessities of association and community, and build infrastructure in disregard for human scale and use, so they perpetuate the war system. They fail to control and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, and spawn terrorists, because they make populations targets for fighting war instead of links to overcome grounds for conflict and to prevent war.
City, Save Thyself! argues that the worst national mistake is to prepare for war while neglecting globally enforced law that could prevent war. The target populations, leveraging their numbers in the manner that Brugmann describes, but adding direct elections to a global municipal security congress, could force the nations to remedy that neglect.
Jeb Brugmann and I were together in 1986 in Cambridge’s first sister city delegation to Yerevan, capital of Armenia, then still part of the U.S.S.R. Twenty U.S.-Soviet sister city pairings did as much to end the Cold War as Reagan’s arms race escalations, and without the ruinous economic and terrorist side effects of the nuclear arms race. Both Jeb’s book and mine describe these city initiatives.
Jeb made further trips to the Soviet Union and describes how powerless the Soviet government was to repress citizen initiatives, try as they often did. It is interesting to reflect that both the Gorbachev and Reagan governments encouraged the U.S.-U.S.S.R. sister city movement, and that, when it comes to security, Soviet cities may have freed themselves from national constraints better than our American cities that now, because of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons, may be more in danger from weapons of mass destruction than cities in any country.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
The Terror Response - What’s Missing
It looks as though the technology of travel, communication, and weaponry may lend themselves more readily to disruption and cruelty than to order and peace. It is fine to seek safety in watch lists and body scanners. In the long run, though, defensive measures will not be enough to avoid the worst results of a nuclear arms race overlaid with non deterrable terrorism. To achieve order and peace we had better make greater effort to employ the ease of communication and travel to reaching a closer knit world.
The worst delusion that might beset our generation is that humans unavoidably and irrevocably must split into warring tribes. If we join Samuel Huntington and his legion of professors and generals who settle for perpetual war, end-time nuclear disaster will prove inevitable. The alternative is to bring people together, reduce grounds for cross-cultural hatred, and restrict weaponry to law enforcement that governs all nations and peoples and regulates the creation and ownership of weapons.
A ready-made medium exists for starting the long process to achieve this - the cities and towns of the world. Their populations are the ultimate targets, both of terrorism and war. They house the achievements of civilization. Their politics and governments, unlike most of the national governments including our own, are within the political reach of ordinary citizens. And, a huge amount of cross border relationships between cities and towns already exists, through trade, tourism, cultural and educational exchanges, and organizations like Sister Cities International and Mayors for Peace.
Targeted citizens, which in the nuclear age is all of us, world-wide, should emulate the courageous airliner passengers who have attacked suicide bombers hand-to-hand. They should move across borders with ballots, organization, communication, and travel. If a dozen citizens in three or four cities and towns in each of a few countries took a simple step, the effort could be underway within a year. That step would be to put a slot on the municipal ballot to directly elect a local representative to an international municipal security congress.
A global security congress, empowered by the ballot, with a single assignment, the security of populations, would quickly insist upon the essentials of security, which are enforced global law kept accountable by cross border democracy. Fully realized, it might take fifty years, but the impact on the roots of terrorism would start right away. And, compared to the sixty-five years since Hiroshima that have brought us to this perilous time, it is not long at all.
High on the agenda would be pressure on national governments to eliminate nuclear weapons. Sixty-five years without effective action reflects the fact that people who run national governments have more on their minds than the safety of populations, which, in the end, is all that matters. National governments answer to the stockholders and employees of their missile makers, to generals and admirals, to economic, ideological, and ethnic voting blocks, to excitable media. World order under law is not even close to the top of the list.
A global security congress of elected city representatives could make national governments put first things first - war prevention ahead of war fighting, enforced law ahead of profits, security ahead of sovereignty, cooperation ahead of tribalism, communicating and understanding ahead of competing patriotisms.
The worst delusion that might beset our generation is that humans unavoidably and irrevocably must split into warring tribes. If we join Samuel Huntington and his legion of professors and generals who settle for perpetual war, end-time nuclear disaster will prove inevitable. The alternative is to bring people together, reduce grounds for cross-cultural hatred, and restrict weaponry to law enforcement that governs all nations and peoples and regulates the creation and ownership of weapons.
A ready-made medium exists for starting the long process to achieve this - the cities and towns of the world. Their populations are the ultimate targets, both of terrorism and war. They house the achievements of civilization. Their politics and governments, unlike most of the national governments including our own, are within the political reach of ordinary citizens. And, a huge amount of cross border relationships between cities and towns already exists, through trade, tourism, cultural and educational exchanges, and organizations like Sister Cities International and Mayors for Peace.
Targeted citizens, which in the nuclear age is all of us, world-wide, should emulate the courageous airliner passengers who have attacked suicide bombers hand-to-hand. They should move across borders with ballots, organization, communication, and travel. If a dozen citizens in three or four cities and towns in each of a few countries took a simple step, the effort could be underway within a year. That step would be to put a slot on the municipal ballot to directly elect a local representative to an international municipal security congress.
A global security congress, empowered by the ballot, with a single assignment, the security of populations, would quickly insist upon the essentials of security, which are enforced global law kept accountable by cross border democracy. Fully realized, it might take fifty years, but the impact on the roots of terrorism would start right away. And, compared to the sixty-five years since Hiroshima that have brought us to this perilous time, it is not long at all.
High on the agenda would be pressure on national governments to eliminate nuclear weapons. Sixty-five years without effective action reflects the fact that people who run national governments have more on their minds than the safety of populations, which, in the end, is all that matters. National governments answer to the stockholders and employees of their missile makers, to generals and admirals, to economic, ideological, and ethnic voting blocks, to excitable media. World order under law is not even close to the top of the list.
A global security congress of elected city representatives could make national governments put first things first - war prevention ahead of war fighting, enforced law ahead of profits, security ahead of sovereignty, cooperation ahead of tribalism, communicating and understanding ahead of competing patriotisms.
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